


worn

by sirfeit



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 09:15:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20240440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirfeit/pseuds/sirfeit
Summary: And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone. --John Seavy, "The Evolution of the Disc"





	worn

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for my D&D campaign

You swim from the afternoon to the evening. It’s not a city known for its beaches, but there is a harbor, and you can get out the beach towels, the sun hats, the big dark glasses. You can sit on the dock and you can watch the water.

You’re better at swimming this time around, and the water is in your ears, and your hair, and you taste salt and seawater. Vildas is here, and you can understand him, abyssal words filtered through to understanding in your pointy ears. You talk about beginnings; when you were growing up in the desert, in the temple. There are no insects in the desert; here in the city, gnats and flies are everywhere, clustering where people are, to leach from them, a closed ecosystem. In the city, it’s short grasses and flies and people, all sorts of people, and an occasional horse. There are rocks, but they’re all hewn and made into something; there are no ancient things here.

At home, there are cave systems — you explain the differences between stalactites and stalagmites, and it’s a little hard navigating between Common and Abyssal here, especially while you’re trying to concentrate on swimming. Rocks all have a story to tell, and you only have to pick one up to learn it.

Anyone who isn’t looking might think the desert is barren and empty, but you know all of the desert’s rumors. Shifting sands reveal different plants; be careful where you step because you might be smashing a burrow, full of a fennec fox or scorpions. Fifty-fifty, really. 

When the fog passes over the mountains, the nets above the temple take the moisture in, and condense into water that you used to grow your crops, to drink from, to take showers with. A luxury! Cities form around water, around rivers, but in the desert there is only the moon, and the fog over the mountains, and the sand. Cacti are more hydrated than the soil they grow in, and that’s how you learned to live.

Vildas listens to your beginnings, your environment, and tells you, a little haltingly, of his: _my city has no name. My beginnings have no name_ and it takes you a little to realize that it means that — they don’t exist anymore, that they have — died? Disappeared? You don’t know, and it’s not something you want to ask. He talks about an underwater city, of how he got the scar on his face, raised and — You wouldn’t call it ugly. Just — It is a painful memory. But it is not even that anymore — sometimes you take trauma, and you try to sort it out in your mind, turning it over and over again in your head that the edges become worn, until it is less painful. Not that it hurt any less, but that it doesn’t hurt any more. My father has no name: I have my family still. My beginnings have no name: I look toward the future.

The moon is the same in all the skies. Lights up the desert and the ocean the same. In your temple, there is a — sacred sentence for this, a proverb. “The future is bright, and it is shining, and it is for everyone.” A year ago, you could hardly believe that there were things beyond the desert. Today, you have gotten used to the green, and you yearn for the yellow of the desert. Not everyone is the same, not everything is the same. But there is a kernel of likeness in all of us: all things strive to go forward.


End file.
